Pills versus healthy living

15th March 2012

An Oxford University academic has warned that people in Britain prefer to use pills to fight chronic illnesses like heart disease instead of living healthy lives.

In a lecture in London on the world’s ageing population, Professor Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said using drugs to prevent the worst effects of lifestyle illnesses was likely to become more and more common in the future. But she questioned whether the wholesale medicalisation of society was a good thing.